This post was published long before the Mists of Pandara Expansion.
The tips and techniques explained here may be outdated.

Warlock Spell: Shadow Bolt

Here’s my visualization of the spell cast. Above is the timeline. It’s dotted in 1 second intervals with an extra dark dot at each 5 seconds to make it easier to read.

The spell is cast at time 0. It has a 2.5 second cast and the “X” is the Global Cooldown (GCD) (1.5 seconds) which occurs at the beginning of its cast time while it’s casting. This can crit for (normally) 1.5 times the damage. The damage occurs at the end of the cast time (at 2.5 secs).

Given my affliction spec and assuming I have 1k bonus shadow damage and 15% crit rate I should see an average of 1900 damage for each Shadow Bolt.

Relevant Talents:

Nightfall 2/2 – Gives each tick of your Corruption and Drain Life spells a 2/4% chance to cause you to enter a Shadow Trance state after damaging the opponent. The Shadow Trance state reduces the casting time of your next Shadow Bolt spell by 100%

Improved Shadow Bolt 5/5 – Your Shadow Bolt critical strikes increase shadow damage dealt to the target by 4/8/12/16/20% until 4 non-periodic damage are applied. Effect lasts a maximum of 12 seconds.
To quote TeePee: “I’m going to assume that Improved Shadow Bolt will on average give you a 10% damage increase overall. Due to the nature of how it works, its very hard to put an exact number on it, but 10% seems to get used widely around the web (and its a nice round number).”

Backlash 0/5 – Increase your critical strike chance with spells by 1/2/3% and gives you a 8/16/25% chance when hit by a physical attack to reduce the casting time of your next Shadow Bolt or Incinerate by 100%. This effect lasts 8 seconds and will not occur more than once every 8 seconds.

As always, nice in depth post – I’m curious about the damage that’s appearing on your screenshot for Shadowbolt though. I had thought the base damage for SB is 541-603? Really not meaning to be nit-picking your well researched post, its just your screenshot really surprised me – wondering if i’m going on old data or something and need to go update my post… /confused

Being an engineer means always trying to find the most efficient (or lazy – depends on you pov) way of doing something.

Affliction is necessarily more complicated anyway because of actual spell rotations (not just SB spam) – and the 4-piece bonus of t4 only complicates it with an extra tick of immolate and corruption changing the DoT refresh timing.

Good luck with your project – I look forward to seeing the results and how they match my own calculations.

I once tried to create comparative graphs of the DS/SnF build vs the ruin/MD succubus build with demonic tactics and demonic knowledge (stamina and intellect from gear and typical raid buffs on you and your succy into consideration). It turned out to be a 4-dimensional graph which is a bit difficult to visualize. In the end I had to pick certain sections of the graph, using spell damage/sta/int based on typical gearing.

It’s a slightly better build at kara gear levels, but more spell damage makes shadow and flame beat out demonic knowledge because the bonus spell damage from +sta/+int doesn’t scale as well (although you get +15.5% to all damage with soul link and md having your succubus out versus +15% to shadow only from saccing her with the typical destro build – and +5% crit from demonic tactics instead of 3% from backlash).

So it turns out the base damage is influenced by your spec. This is annoying and will need to be dealt with. I guess at some point I’m going to respec and copy down tooltips while spec-less. *sigh* bother.